Some books require a lot of uninterrupted concentration. As I wrote recently in a review of Leonard Susskind’s Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum, it would be an ideal book to take along if you were banished to a desert island. After a few years of careful reading, and re-reading, you’d be a master of quantum mathematics. It would make you a better person.

But suppose you had already mastered quantum mechanics before being banished (or perhaps knowing quantum mechanics was why you got ...